Stupid. He slammed down his receiver, the anger bubbling like nauseous indigestion or heartburn.
The three men walked abreast along the glass-littered pavement, stepping carefully over the trailing hosepipes, averting their gaze from the occasional blanketed forms, preferring the grim neutrality of ruined buildings and the gaping dark interiors of shops. A naked tailor's dummy lay sprawled through the glassless window of one shop, grotesque and mocking. McBride, alone of the three of them, seemed distracted from Walsingham's conversation by the rubble, the drawn and haggard faces, the lumps under the grey blankets, the stench of burning, the wet pavements. A stranger from a distant country, he felt out of place, disturbed and obscurely angry.
A typing pool sat in chairs arranged behind desks like a class of children. Behind them, their offices had crumbled in upon themselves, with grotesque diffidence and good manners only spilling a few crumbs of masonry and brick into the street. A balding, self-important man with half-glasses and a small, yellowed moustache was checking their work fussily between bouts of dictation to his secretary. His desk was larger than those of the typists, and virtually undamaged. The clatter of typewriters, the droning of the man's voice and the occasional rumble of traffic beyond seemed to satisfy Walsingham, and the three of them became a tight little group in animated discussion.
'Charlie, you're greedy, you want everything,' McBride said, his voice belying the grin on his face.
'Michael, my boy, you're the one to get it from the Germans, if anyone can—' Gilliatt felt an outsider in the conversation, a visitor observing the verbal and facial games of a married couple; a semaphore he barely understood. He was taller than the other two, and this seemed a further distance.
'Hell, Charlie. Brest is tight as a virgin. Guernsey was easy — but not this. You want army and navy stuff, and you want it in twenty-four hours. It's not on, Charlie.'
'I think it is. You'll be picked up at the drop, ferried to the Plabennec area. All I want is proof that new divisions have been moved in there — in Brest, all I need is proof that the U-boats from Guernsey are sitting there, awaiting their passengers.'
A telephone rang, startling all three of them. The man in the half-glasses picked it up from his desk. He seemed suddenly aware of them, and turned his back as he answered his call. The telephone lead snaked away from his desk along the street, Gilliatt noticed for the first time. He felt the little incident to be quite unreal, and realized also that the dialogue between McBride and Walsingham was similarly lacking in reality. He had anaesthetized himself against it, unwilling to accept his situation.
'Charlie, you just haven't got the contacts in France to pull it off. This isn't a two-man bob rushing down the Cresta run. I need a team.'
'I have the contacts—'
'You trust them? You've tested them, tried them out?' Walsingham shook his head. 'Your honesty does you no credit at all, Charlie!' McBride grinned again. Gilliatt almost felt the man's facial muscles were completely beyond his control. Or perhaps it was mockery? Certainly, Gilliatt's impression of Walsingham was that he disposed of questions of human safety very easily if they came between him and his objective. Yet he knew that McBride was going to accept his orders, whatever qualifications he felt. He had not, as yet, entirely expended his gratitude at not being put back behind a desk in OIC.
'I get good intelligence from them,' Walsingham asserted.
'Then ask them to find out for you.'
'I need your
'So much for the reliability of these Frogs, Charlie. You don't trust them to be right this time, mm?'
Walsingham shrugged. 'I want you to go tonight,' he said.
'You piss off, Charlie. Peter here and me, we'll discuss it, and see you back at the office. How about that?' Walsingham appeared to Gilliatt to be nonplussed for once. Then he nodded, almost curtly, turned on his heel and walked away. Gilliatt and McBride watched his determined stride until he turned a corner into the Strand. Then McBride looked up at Gilliatt, studying him with a suddenly intense look.
'Well, Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt—' Gilliatt suddenly looked down at his civilian jacket and trousers as if they belied his rank. 'And what do you think to that?' McBride nodded in the direction taken by Walsingham. Gilliatt smiled. There was a charm, possibly specious, about McBride that was irresistible at that moment. Dark, medium build, good-looking in a slightly untrustworthy way, McBride was a strange and perhaps unreliable species. But Gilliatt found himself warming to the man, found within himself a penchant for future recklessness that he suspected was transmitted from the Irishman.
'I — don't know. You're the expert on Lieutenant-Commander Walsingham — what do you say?'
'Charlie is scared bloody stiff, young fellow, I know that much.'
'How come?'
'He
Gilliatt ignored the blonde, who by now had smiled at him, much to the irritation of the man with the nicotine-stained moustache and the half-glasses. Gilliatt saw a girl bringing out a tray full of mugs and cups of tea from the shattered interior of the offices.
'Stove's still working, Mr Hubank,' she called out.
'Thank you, Gloria.' He seemed displeased that the routine of his office-in-the-street would now be interrupted. As in a classroom, work was already dissolving into chatter.
Gilliatt looked at McBride. 'You don't think we could survive this little jaunt, then?'
He saw McBride weigh him, confirm something to himself.
'Gloria's stove is still working, and it's business as usual here. How long would that last, do you think, if the Germans had a second front in Ireland?' Gilliatt shook his head. 'Not long. There's plenty of people in Ireland who'd help the Germans, and a lot more who'd accept them. And there's nothing the British could do about it. Now, operatives are not supposed to think about things like that. That's Charlie's job, and he's scared stiff. You
'So, you'll go?'
McBride looked around him. An ambulance passed, bell noisily demanding attention, but he seemed more drawn by the typing pool chattering in their tea-break.
'They had bananas yesterday, but by the time Mum got there, he'd sold out, the miserable old Jew. She says she won't go there again.'
'Got a cigarette, Sandra?'
'Smoked your ration, now you want to smoke mine. Bloody cheek!'
'He said he was doing hush-hush work, abroad and that. He might not come back, see—'
'And you let 'im? You are stupid, Norma!'
McBride turned back to Gilliatt.
'Not a lot there you'd consider dying for, is there?' He laughed. 'But then, I don't do it for anyone but myself, do I now?' He rubbed a hand through his hair. 'I'll be on the plane tonight, parachute strapped on tight. Why don't you come along for the ride? I'll look after the two of us, sure I will!' The comic brogue, the evident recklessness made McBride a stereotype for a moment.
Gilliatt shrugged. 'Why not?'
Admiralty records were stored in half a dozen places around London still awaiting transfer to the Public Records Office at Kew. McBride had gained, via the office of the Secretary to the Admiralty, access to each one of the records offices as an historian whose latest project was a study of naval warfare in the North Atlantic and the Western Approaches during 1940 and 1941. His academic background was impeccable, his best-selling status in America no handicap. He had a different coloured pass for each of the various offices, but he had returned to the converted primary school in Hackney where he had worked the previous day and which housed minesweeping, anti U-boat, and convoy duty records for the duration of the war as well as the offices of some signals branch of the navy. McBride did not bother himself with considering this department's function or legitimacy, beyond a certain comparative amusement at a converted primary school's claims to security over the massive CIA complex at
